IN THE WORKS(New Translations)

Cheeky international best-seller about life in an old age home

Hendrik Groen may be old, but he’s definitely not yet dead. Granted, his daily walks are becoming shorter and shorter because his legs ache, and he trots frequently to his GP’s office; growing old is not for sissies. But he does manage to assemble a tight-knit group of friends who look out for one another, and eventually finds that love can happen at any age. In short, honest, and poignant diary entries, Hendrik Groen takes the reader along for a year of ups and downs in a retirement home in Amsterdam.

“The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen continues to draw headlines as the press tries to figure out who is behind the pseudonymous work, written as the diary of an elderly man.”— Publishers Weekly

“Nothing is a lie, but not all of it is true.” — Henrik Groen

THE CONSEQUENCESBy Niña Weijers Forthcoming from DoppelHouse Press September 2017

A novel set in the conceptual art world

An enchanting rollercoaster of a story about Dutch performance artist Minnie Panis, who uses her own life to examine perception, intimacy and identity, is also an existential and philosophical Bildungsroman.

“In this novel, tingling with ambition and fascinating ideas, the life and art of the main character revolve around loss, existence and disappearance. A determined tone characterizes this crazy book.”— NRC Handelsblad

“Up to the last disturbing sentence the writer holds the reader in her manipulative grip.” – De Groene Amsterdammer

“The temptation not to exist, to disappear from the world you’re walking around in, the art you come upon and live with: when you write it down, it sounds like heavy going; when you read it, it’s light. So read it.” —Cees Nooteboom

A posthumous novel narrated by the dying author's indignant protagonist

Traag Licht, written while the author was dying of prostate cancer, takes the form of a struggle between the fictional narrator and Franke himself, whom he calls “the boss”. The narrator thinks Franke is proceeding too cautiously, since he still has a multitude of stories he wants to get off his chest, especially his obsession with discovering the identity of the woman whose risqué turn-of-the-century stereoscopic portrait—a quest that comes at the expense of his real-life relationships. The profiles he draws of people he meets leave the reader guessing which are true and which are imagined. Together they paint a picture of a knowing yet naïve, romantic yet selfish, provincial yet worldly protagonist who, by writing about others, is trying to find out the truth about himself. Herman Franke worked on Traag Licht until four days before his death; it is his last, courageous ode to life.

“Writers are criminals. They have the guts to recognize the evil in themselves and to acknowledge it in their stories.” – Herman Franke

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS 2014 LITERATURE TRANSLATION FELLOWSHIP for translation of Traag Licht by Herman Franke.

Translator's statement: "With death snapping at his heels, Herman Franke wound up adopting a daring, unorthodox narrative structure for this, the last of a planned open-ended, multi-volume novel, interweaving the first-person narrator's endless stream of stories with jottings, musings, and stated intentions. They allow both the character and his author to sketch the broad outlines of stories that might otherwise have got away." READ MORE

WINNIE AND THE INNOCENCE OF THE WORLDBy Joost ZwagermanIncluded in The Penguin Book of Short StoriesForthcoming from Penguin (London) September 2016

For anyone interested in European literature these stories are an undiscovered snapshot of some of the most interesting and important writing of the twentieth and twenty-first century. From the same culture that consistently draws worldwide attention for its groundbreaking and avant-garde movements in the visual arts, this collection displays the same playfulness, innovation and sense of humor in Dutch literary movements. The stories are varied: subversive, profound, hilarious; stylistically experimental and psychologically astute.